Mexican LYM
Addresses Flood Catastrophe
November 2007
by Cynthia Rush
A leaflet written and being widely circulated by the LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM) in Mexico, addressing the ongoing flooding disaster in the poverty-stricken states of Tabasco and Chiapas, in southern Mexico. That leaflet is printed below.
It is currently estimated that 1 million of Tabasco's 2 million inhabitants have been affected by the flooding, and there are 70,000 victims in neighboring Chiapas. Close to 90% of Tabasco, and its capital city of Villahermosa, is under water.
The situation in Villahermosa is so dire that the state Government Secretary Humberto Mayans has warned of a "very high risk" of social crisis and riots like those that occurred after the 1999 floods. Today there are 100,000 people wandering around, who have lost everything. The threat of the outbreak of disease is great, as there is no potable water or sanitation services.
Mexico's pathetic free-marketeer President Felipe Calderón has had the audacity to say that "climate change" is the cause of the flooding disaster. Tabasco's Governor, Andrés Granier, quickly disabused him of that lie, charging that the tragedy is the result of years of disinvestment in infrastructure. Governor Granier pointed out that, had projects scheduled for completion last May been finished, "there would have been damage, yes, but not the catastrophe we are now suffering." This would require, minimally, an investment of 6 billion pesos, the Governor said, yet the federal budget has allocated only a pathetic 387 million.
Mexican engineer Manuel Frías, an expert in water-management and flood control, underscored the criminality of Calderón's position even more dramatically. Frías told EIR that at the time of the 1999 floods, he proposed the specific infrastructure projects that were required, and warned that were they not built, any future flooding would be "a catastrophe." The current rainfall in the region is no worse than in 1999, he reported. It is the infrastructure deficit alone that is responsible for the current disaster. Only a global, integrated, and properly financed program can solve the problem, Frías said.
Adding its voice, Mexico's College of Civil Engineers published a study Nov. 7, stating that more than 20 billion pesos is required for investment in crucial water infrastructure projects in both Tabasco and Chiapas, with special emphasis on the "integral management" of the Grijalva and Usumacinta river basins, as well as the diversion of both rivers. In the last 50 years, only four dams have been built on the Grijalva River, while no flood-control projects exist on the Usumacinta River. The overflow of 16 rivers in Chiapas led to flooding of 30 municipalities, and mudslides that threaten entire towns.
The LYM leaflet is dramatically illustrated with matching photos of the flooding in post-Katrina New Orleans, and of flooded Tabasco today, as well as maps of the integrated water management projects for Mexico—the PLHINO and the PLHIGÓN—and the World Land-Bridge.
LaRouche Strategy Excites Packed Sonora, Mexico Forum on Great Infrastructure Projects
November 12, 2007
Ciudad Obregon, Sonora
Over 500 people overflowed this city's principal auditorium on November 9, for the regional forum entitled "Let Us Build the Bridge to the Future, the PLHINO of the Twenty-first Century: Water, Energy and Food for Mexico." The conference was organized by the 15-organization Pro-Plhino Committee, founded at the initiative of Lyndon LaRouche's associates in the region, to assemble the political juggernaut required to finally get construction going on the long-planned, tri-state water management project known as the North West Hydraulic Plan, or PLHINO.
The discussion was shaped by the intense national debate and shock over the horrible destruction just wrecked on the south of the country by heavy rains, precisely because long-planned necessary water projects were not built.
As presented with beautiful, detailed maps by Mexican engineer Manuel Frias Alcaracaz, the PLHINO entails a 400-plus kilometer-long set of dams, tunnels and canals, bringing the waters of 16 rivers from the state of Nayarit to the dry but fertile lands of neighboring Sinoloa and Sonora, opening up 700,000 new hectares of land for farming, while generating electricity and jobs in all three states. Pro-Plhino coordinator and LaRouche associate Alberto Vizcarra Osuna detailed how such state-directed infrastructure projects as the PLHINO are a matter of national interest, for Mexico to secure its food sovereignty.
The centerpiece of the five hour forum, was a presentation by Executive Intelligence Review's Dennis Small, on Lyndon LaRouche's global strategy to save civilization from financial collapse and a new dark age, by mobilizing global cooperation behind great infrastructure projects. Not only must Mexico build the PLHINO, Small argued, but the United States and Mexico, must establish exemplary cooperation, along with Canada, in jointly building the gigantic North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA) project, to transport waters currently flowing into the Arctic Ocean from Canada and Alaska, down through the western United States, and into northern Mexico, including into Sonora's Yaqui River .
The audience responded enthusiastically, remarking: "the PLHINO is good, but why stop there? NAWAPA, the Bering Straits Tunnel project: now those are big!"
Participation in the conference revealed the political army forming for a return to great state-directed infrastructure: two federal senators and several federal Congressmen from the states of Sonora and Sinoloa, Sonoran state legislators and officials, mayors from across southern Sonora, national and regional peasant leaders, students, farmers and labor representatives.
The conference was closed by Sonora's Senator Alfonso Elias Serrano and Governor Eduardo Bours, both of whom endorsed the PHLINO, and the idea of "thinking big," as necessary to secure Mexico's future.
The following is a translation of the mass leaflet being circulated by the LaRouche Youth Movement in Mexico.
On the Tragedy of Tabasco
Infrastructure Is the Solution
To the Economic Collapse
 Hurricane flood in the state of Tabasco, Mexico, near Villahermosa, Fall 2007 |
We are living through the worst economic-financial and cultural crisis in the history of humanity. This reality is revealed in the disaster in Tabasco, Chiapas, and Oaxaca: food shortages, lack of drinking water and medicines, latent outbreaks of epidemics, entire cities under water. One could easily compare the results of the policies of neo-liberalism, or free trade, in Mexico with the scene of Tabasco today, just as was seen in the United States after Hurricane Katrina.
The governments of both countries have proven incompetent to tackle weather phenomena like these, because of a lack of infrastructure and other relevant programs. On Aug. 31, 2005, Democratic Party economist Lyndon H. LaRouche outlined the measures that needed to be taken immediately, to address what the Bush, Jr. government could not. He warned that the necessary perspective was the development of productive sectors of the economy and infrastructure.
The stupid war policy promoted by Bush and his Vice President Dick Cheney has left all of these important sectors of the U.S. economy unattended. The four states most affected by Hurricane Katrina were devastated economically before Katrina hit, just as the entire Mexican Republic has been over the past 25 years. Not only were planned infrastructure projects halted, but existing projects were dismantled, primarily in the areas of water, transportation, and energy.
Is All This Caused by Global Warming?
"Yes, I can assure the Tabasco people that the origin and cause of this catastrophe is the enormous climate change which, whether you recognize it or not, has produced the largest precipitation ever registered in our history."
With this statement, President Calderón is trying to cover up the real cause of the Tabasco catastrophe: the collapse of infrastructure and physical economy. It is well known that the international financial oligarchy is using media propaganda to stop the development of nations; its free trade policies have found their best ally in the so-called green policy that worships Mother Earth—Gaia. This is a cult that has gained many followers among political groups of the left, center, and right, where the great lie is repeated over and over again. And so the myth of global warming caused by man is the flat-earth myth of the 21st Century. It is the kernel of a new fascism with a green face, an anti-human and genocidal viewpoint.[1]
And What Can Be Done?
What is needed is the reestablishment of productive powers and the building a series of infrastructure projects that can integrate our country once again, and let us join with other sovereign nations in the creation of mechanisms for their financing. It must be carried out by the State, since no private initiative is capable, nor will be, of resolving problems of this magnitude.
The Role of the Nation-State Is the General Welfare
José López Portillo was the last President committed to this idea, and he did everything in his power to make this an industrialized country, establishing the foundations for a Mexico on the road to becoming a self-sufficient industrial power. How did he hope to achieve this?
Let's review a little: Dams, highways, hydroelectric plants, schools, hospitals, chemical plants, petrochemical plants, steel mills, iron works, transportation, agriculture, ranching, education, and food. Mexico was on the path to development, including the application of nuclear technology. These are just some of the sectors in which there was such an impressive increase that it led to self-sufficiency, something which with today's economic policy, appears to be just a dream or pure rhetoric.
In fact, it wasn't until the end of the López Portillo Presidency, when Miguél de la Madrid came in, that Mexico was immediately led into the macabre game of financial speculation, free trade, and globalization. A game so macabre that it has annihilated entire nations and now threatens the United States itself, and above all, our own country, with unthinkable disaster.[2]
PLHIGÓN and PLHINO
In 1983, a select group of Mexican engineers schooled in the tradition of the Fusion Energy Foundation (an institution founded around the concepts of physical economy and scientific Renaissance inspired by Lyndon LaRouche), created a development program for Mexico which included a water management plan that we must revive today. This includes the Hydraulic Plan of the Northeast Gulf (PLHIGÓN), to which we will refer only in part. The Grijalva-Usumacinta river system is among the seven most important in the world, based on the volume of water—110.9 million cubic meters—dumped into the sea, representing 30% of Mexico's surface drainage. This is enough water to double our agricultural and hydroelectric potential.
Construction Is the Solution
We need projects, many projects, which, under a new form of economic cooperation for peace, will guarantee the population's welfare. Russia is now proposing the construction of a high-speed railroad tunnel under the Bering Strait—a proposal currently under broad discussion in high-level political circles in China, India, and the United States. Similarly, in South America, the member countries of the Bank of the South enthusiastically see the potential to create industrial development corridors by means of high-speed rail, and through the creation of the necessary credit mechanisms. Once again, the State must regulate the economy. Only in this way can the projects be developed that are necessary for the sustained growth of a nation.
No aid fund is going to help. The states must reintegrate themselves, through development corridors. There can be no pretext for stopping the development of the nation, and we must not accept "no" for an answer.
We must therefore change our way of thinking with regard to the economy, and we must fight for a new international economic order that will allow us the necessary flow of credit to build many projects like the PLHINO and PLHIGÓN, which have become part of the World Land-Bridge—proposals that the LaRouche movement is carrying to every part of the world. Join this effort and get in touch with us. Lyndon H. LaRouche is right, and it is time to listen to him.
Footnotes:
[1] NASA and other astrophysical research centers in Russia report that Mars has warmed .65 degrees C between 1970 and 1990. Should we be talking about Universal Warming instead of Global Warming? Don't believe it. There are already thousands of scientists who reject the theory of climate change caused by man as simply unscientific. Even the British Channel 4 television has aired a documentary video that can be found on the pages of YouTube under the title, "The Great Fraud of Global Warming." For more information, go to: www.wlym.com/~spanish/calentamiento global/calentamiento global.htm.
[2] http://larouchepub.com/spanish/Prometeo/Prometeo_v2n14_carta.pdf, media.schillerinstitute.org/wms/eir/misc/2007/Jose_Lopez_Portillo/ UNO_speech_15min_300kbpsSpanish.wmv
Related pages:
LaRouche in Dialogue with Ibero-American Trade Union Leaders Mexico City, June 22, 2007
Open Letter To Governments: Oppose the Global Warming Hoax by Helga Zepp-Larouche, May 2007
Our ‘Tsunami’ Was Called Katrina! by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
The Great Crisis of 2005: End-Game 2005 by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche Statement on the Tsunami December 29, 2004
Berlin Seminar: Society Needs a New Paradigm, More Worthy of the Dignity of Man by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA)
Water from the Gulf of Mexico Can Green the Great American Desert
